Mother and Child Read online

  What do you want of us? the mother asked. Her ears grew long and pointed, best for sound detection, and her eyes grew shining and focused as she tried to detect what shapes its mouth took. In an instant her teeth grew sharp in case she needed to chew the child away from it.

  Now it was definitive: she was sutured to the wild world and the wild world to her.

  What do you want, the mother asked, and it screeched as if to say, I was there with you last night in the wind and the dark. I was with you there. The mother tried to decipher the chitter but could not. I was here and I did sup a bit from one of you.

  How vulnerable are the dwellings we humans make for ourselves to inhabit, the mother thought later. When the child dwelled in the mother, the mother had passed oxygen and nutrients to the child through the placenta. She thought of the permeable world and all that was porous and of the insistence of the fetus that had knitted itself within her womb.

  It’s a bat, the child said. A bat!

  The mother trembled, fearful of the ferocity of the world and all the things she was at the mercy of—and for the child, who had been fearfully made—and she opened all the windows so that the creature might find its way back to the night.

  THE MOTHER REMEMBERED when the time of the Pentecost was fulfilled, they were in one place together, and suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were.

  In the Book of Wisdom it is asked, who can know the bat’s counsel or conceive what the bat intends? For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are their plans. The corruptible body burdens the soul, and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns. And scarcely do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp, we find with great difficulty.

  THE MOTHER KNEW the vampire bat extracted blood from large, slumbering, terrestrial mammals. There were bats that aimed for the warm breastplates of birds. She knew there were those who stalked blood bearers on land.

  A white-winged vampire bat moves so softly and lovingly, toward the hen, that the hen allows it into its fold. The cozy bat administers, along with its bite, a natural blood clot buster to ensure a steady flow. Some bats consume half their body weight in blood each night. Woe, the mother thought, to the Blue-Footed Booby, a bat’s delicacy.

  Sometimes the child felt that the mother knew too many things. Still, the mother and child, despite the night and the bat and the Blue-Footed Booby, grew sleepy and before too long were asleep.

  WITH LANTERNS THEY approached the Spiegelpalais. A red velvet curtain rose before them on the forest path, and the audience began to applaud. There was a cacophony of wings—yes, some sort of rubied rabble, there could be no doubt.

  Against a white scrim, a shadow figure on a trapeze could be seen swinging and singing in a high voice. Flittermouse, Flittermouse, what are you doing in the child’s house?

  WHEN THE BAT appeared flying low above her head, the mother realized that they had been exposed to something that could not be reversed. The bat had appeared as a messenger, and she was afraid. The child put her hands up against it in protection. A bat, the mother knew, could rest lightly on the neck without you even knowing it and make a puncture with its hatpin teeth in your skin no larger than an insect’s—its wings spread like a paper fan, with the weight of a bird, and no one would know. She looked at the child. What did it want? Take these words, it screeched. But what were the words? And bind them to your wrist as a sign. Observe, it screeched, all the statues and decrees that are set before you.

  The mother woke with a start. Before the child was born, the mother had been a nurse. She used to love the clean, blinding surfaces—and the white hat.

  At night, the mother explained to the child, a bat can land on the face like a fan, then close up, taking your life.

  The mother reassured the child that the vaccines against the bat would not be so bad, but that they would need to go to the hospital.

  The child could not remember ever having been in a hospital before. The child asked if she could bring her lamb.

  WHILE THE MOTHER and the child waited in the Emergency Room for the serum—thick, cloudy, viscous—the child asked if they might play a game of Hangman and the mother complied. Now carrying the recollection of the bat’s gibberish in them, the mother and child embraced the babble. A jumbled alphabet poured from them, as the mother tried to decipher the word concealed before her. It’s three words actually, the child said. Look. And the mother began to guess the letters of the phrase the child had chosen while slowly the little hanging man materialized.

  CALAMITOUS IS THE day. The halls of the Emergency Room fill. The sleeping American tenor is wheeled in while the mother and child wait. The American tenor, destitute, has taken a box of tablets and now slumbers. Here he lies, whooshing past, sedate, supine; no one can revive him.

  He is slumbering in the green hills near death; he will not wake again. How difficult suddenly it is to think of him once singing the role of the melancholy lovelorn poet Werther, someone says.

  Werther is borrowing a pair of pistols from the husband of the woman he loves, only to shoot himself with them, in the last act, on Christmas Eve.

  Angel face with flaxen hair, did you ever care?

  The mother felt unsettled by the thought of all the men in the Valley who were disappearing, some destined to perish by their own hands, leaving behind the strangest and saddest relics: a Christmas cup, a piano, a treatise on whales, a vortex, a glove.

  THE MOTHERS OF Sorrow traipse through the Emergency Room in anguish, following their faltering sons.

  A boy who had fallen from a tree comes in. Three days earlier, the boy, who is five, got up and brushed himself off, and talked and walked, only now to fall into an irretrievable sleep. The doctors say the five-year-old had been afflicted with the malady they call Talk and Die.

  Another boy dressed head-to-toe in camouflage spots has been wounded. An unspotted Mother of Sorrow follows the body.

  A third boy, small and blue and filled with smoke, rescued from the top floor of a house, rushes by.

  The mothers cry and beat their breasts and ask why, but no sound comes out, and it does not matter; no answer is forthcoming. The Mothers of Sorrow are getting sleepy, and as they walk they seem to close their eyes, and the Virgin in her grotto is falling asleep as well. Before she drifts off she is seen holding in one arm an infant, and in her other hand, a nail. The sleepiness in the Virgin is called the Virgin Dormition, and the sleepiness in the Mothers of Sorrow is called the Maiden Dormition. The fear is so great for some of the mothers in the Emergency Room that they fall into a kind of stupor and go back to the time before they had children and were maidens and could rest.

  The world is so filled with sleep and silence. Once Mother Teresa began her work with the poor and dying in Calcutta, she never heard God’s voice again. For fifty years she continued without a word. It takes a special person to forge on anyway. An up-to-date candidate for sainthood would need to be able to bear that much silence and doubt, the mother thinks.

  Any vulnerability, the mother reasoned, might drive a bat to one’s side.

  False gods flew above their heads and were everywhere before them. The mother had dreamt her whole life of becoming something winged, but she didn’t know how. That night, medical workers seen from above, drenched in light, waited for casualties, but no casualties came. The mother remembers the hover, a state of suspension that she carries inside her to this day.

  At the moment of the American tenor’s death, the room flooded with song, and the mother and the child looked up.

  THE VIRGIN HAS awoken. The child pulls at the mother’s sleeve and directs her attention back to their game of Hangman, and at last from the jumble of alphabet, the mother can read the child’s message. I AM SCARED.

  I AM SCARED. Her body is changing. They notice it there on the hospital bed as they wait for the vaccination.

  You can see now, the mother says, where th
e wings will fit.

  The Virgin beckons for them to come forward.

  What do you want of us? the mother asks.

  3

  THE FOX HAS its den and the Ovenbird its nest, but the mother and the child have no place to rest their heads. Come with me, the Virgin says.

  Revelers, mourners, pilgrims, and seekers were on their way to the Spiegelpalais. From the smallest of embers, the Great Wind had ignited fires that burned on the horizon and fell on the heads of the sojourners, granting them wisdom and direction, and though they did not speak the same language, when they at last arrived at the place, each miraculously was able to understand the other.

  Many in the Valley stood outside the Spiegelpalais and wondered why pilgrims were arriving from all points on earth, but after the initial flurry of inquiries, such questions passed and did not return again. A mass hypnosis seemed to settle over the Valley, and soon no one remembered a time the Spiegelpalais had not been there, or could imagine a future in which it was not included. Many stood outside and waited, but few gained admittance, so when the mother and child were issued in easily, under the Virgin’s auspices, the mother felt vaguely worried, as if it were some sort of trick.

  FROM THE OUTSIDE it had seemed a dream arena: ephemeral, unmoored, a ghost ship festooned with banners and flags; but inside, the Spiegelpalais felt more solid, immovable, real. An endless series of rooms and vaults seemed to open in every direction. Some rooms were linked by corridors, some by canals, some by woodland paths, and there was a central atrium where there burned a small live fire.

  Soul cakes, someone sang around the fire where a mourning party huddled. Soul cakes were being roasted and a glass orchestra played.

  Darkened passages, leading to rabbits and rabbit holes or woodchucks in their dens and collapsible floors were everywhere. Rooms as if in a dream, inviting, irresistible, moss-laden, called to them.

  Off stage right, cordoned off, flowed the Rhine. People gathered at its banks and wept. The mother and child felt their own river, just outside the door, like a silk swathe move through them. Boxes of fog were opened.

  All was in motion. There were elevators that rose and fell, trap-doors, ropes and pulleys, dumbwaiters, escape hatches. There were sliding stages. The sky became a canyon, the canyon filled with water and became an Italian lake draped in crepe de chine, the lake froze and a tundra opened before them. They walked through a snow garden, a garden of concrete deities, a children’s garden, a fox’s garden, a cinder garden where children played, and the glen. In the glen a boy played an irresistible tune on a panpipe. A deer appeared in a clearing—but before the child could reach it, it was gone, vanished in the dark wood.

  AN ENORMOUS TURNTABLE filled an airplane hangar at the back of the Spiegelpalais upon which elaborate tableaux were in the process of being constructed. A maple tree was being assembled, a mute man made of straw, a Flagship, a child’s truck enlarged to life size, a seed crib. Freed from their burden of narrative, these objects seemed all the more mysterious, and everyone marveled at their inscrutable beauty. A pupa, a papyrus raft, a rose-laden boat.

  Out of nothing an entire world had begun to materialize before the mother and child. An array of scene painters and seamstresses and carpenters and artisans of all sorts were busy at work constructing skyscrapers and churches and clock towers and other facades. Pastoral scenes had been rendered with great feeling, a beautiful grotto had been made one rock at a time, and cityscapes were depicted under heartbreakingly blue skies.

  Look! the child said. There, and she tugged at her mother’s sleeve; on a painted ocean was Uncle Sven—whimsically portrayed.

  PARADED BEFORE THEM was all of life. Enigmatic emblems streamed past as the mother and child walked, but they were not afraid. In the place called the Night Archive, inventory of some kind was being taken, and things were being summed up, accounted for, tallied. Piled to the ceilings were logbooks and ledgers and bibles: the Hair Bible, the Bird Atlas, the Red Book of Existence.

  When they came to the place called the Aging Stage, the mother and child were stopped. On the Aging Stage, a voice explained, a few steps forward and you are a baby again, a few steps back—an old woman. The mother watched her siblings. What were they doing here?

  Five giant steps were taken forward, and suddenly Lars, Ingmar, Anders, Sven, and baby Inga have not yet been born. It frightened the mother. Only the empty black perambulator, funereal, waited stage left for the babies to come.

  Back in place and four steps in the other direction, and they were no more.

  AN OPEN CALL for extras sounded throughout the Spiegelpalais. We need Human Pollinators, we need totem animals of every sort, we need a steady stream of beekeepers, we need pilgrims for the Concrete Rabbit. Had anyone seen Oscar the Death Cat? Had anyone heard from The Headless Horseman Fife and Drum Corps? An amplified voice spoke with urgency. Soldiers were needed, and before you knew it, they came in endless corridors walking in a continuous column toward the mother and the child, and then away, where they disappeared into the fog. Lost to the Phosphorous, the director murmured. Then more would come, and then go, and always more and more were called.

  SOON ENOUGH THE pageant would commence. Various players were being fitted for costumes: Operation Rescue was being measured for bird suits, the President for his evening coat. Pierrot lugged out the Costume Bible. Junot thumbed through the Hair Bible to find where the hair for the Grandmother Wig had been purchased—ah yes—at auction in Sweden for ninety-five dollars an ounce in 1933. There were prop rooms filled with wigs, and wolf suits, and beekeeping paraphernalia.

  Out tumbled a hat with antlers, a fish with a face, an ermine head, a mesh dress, a wig of matted hair.

  Standing far up on a scaffold, men were assembling what appeared to be a human child, several stories high. Three schoolchildren with backpacks standing under a Scholar Tree looked on. When they saw the mother and child, they ran to them and laughed and pulled at them and asked if they might stay and play and read to them awhile, but the mother demurred and stepped away.

  EVERYWHERE REHEARSALS WERE going on in the wings. Actors were running their lines: Flittermouse, Flittermouse . . . a haunting falsetto could be heard. The little pope practiced carrying his glass globe. The glass pyramid was rolled out. Now and then you could pick out a word: wind or tooth or chrysalis or flame, and the mother thought, how strange.

  In the Night Archive the darkness was immense, but there was an abundance of light sources—fireflies, embers encased in jars, and from the vast, arched ceilings, shooting stars.

  Velvet and rhinestones were attached to the ceiling to embellish the evening. In the dressing room, grease paint was being applied to the Night Oil Man’s fearful visage.

  The darkness became such that there was a public plea for daylight. Day in the underground vault was being manufactured with incandescent light and bird effects and sweet breezes and swings.

  Charming scenes of country life were being blocked: barn dances and threshings and fall celebrations. Harvest costumes were tweaked and cornstalks arranged.

  Cecil Peter and Wise Jean and their Piggle passed by on a float. From his windy perch, Cecil Peter rehearsed his lines, calling through a megaphone that the Age of Funnels was upon them. Heed this warning, he said. The Age of Funnels always brings madness when it returns, and this time would be no exception. Their first Piggle had been born aloft on the whirling and carried away. Nail down your loved ones, Wise Jean could be heard saying, before it’s too late. And the blue veil of madness, gossamer, beautifully made, unfurled right on cue. Everywhere there were intimations of the Vortex. Stage crews were adjusting the wind machines to accommodate the endless directives of the script.

  Farmers and their wives practiced their reels. Small children tugged at the women, and the women directed their attention to something in the middle distance, and it seemed as if something were about to happen, but then just as suddenly, the scene began to recede. Already? the mother said. It had scarcely
seemed to have taken shape and it was already dissolving in the haze. The fiddle faded and moved to mirage, and the farmers and their wives and a whole way of life eerily and without music danced away—quaint, iconic, into the ever-increasing distance. A last do-si-do then. Small figures, hauling bales of hay, waved.

  THE THEATER UTOPIA had arrived and had taken up residence on the outdoor stage. En plein air—the birds, the wind, the stars, all would be part of the play. Enter warbler, warbling. Tortoise. Whooping Crane. Aunt Eloise and a single bee. On deck was the Bindlestaff Family Circus. And the Arm of the Sea. And the Beloved Bread and Puppets. On the outdoor stage anything might happen.

  At the Spiegelpalais the child opened her mouth. Her baby teeth were gone. New teeth were coming in.

  At the edge of the meadow, the sleek wolf padding in on rose feet.

  BACK INSIDE AT the Court of Miracles, all marveled at the discovery of Dark Matter, and someone lectured about Quintessence and Phantom Energy. At the summit stood the Vortex Man, and all knelt to his power and bowed their heads in reverence. Behold, he said, the planet on the table! It was a blue planet, perfectly round, very beautiful. Is that us? someone dared at last to ask. Yes, the Vortex Man said, a little sadly.

  Next to the planet was a human eye, a floating miracle of design. Light enters the pupil, is focused and inverted by the cornea and lens, and is projected at the back of the eye where the retina lies—seven layers of alternating cells, which can convert a light signal into a neural sign. The mother, who had once been a nurse, sighs.

  And in the atrium the great orb, which had somehow survived, presided in silence.

  A great winged thing was projected now onto a large screen. Behold, the Vortex Man bellowed, the Luna Moth—from the wild silk moth family—and its enormous wings filled the screen. Many gathered, drawn to its light. Behold its diaphanous and fragile beauty, its wings pale green, its transparent eyespots, its long curving tail. Ladies and gentlemen, they love the Persimmon, the Sweet Gum, the Winged Sumac.